The occasional jottings of a middle-aged husband and father who can see Detroit from his house.

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Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Haven't stopped blogging.

Just a wee bit busy with life outside of the net. We had an early Thanksgiving with my parents, brother, sister-in-law, nephew and niece (my little brother's seniority is, alas, insufficient for actual Thanksgiving time off). Always good to see family.

We also witnessed an historic event: the Lions winning in Wisconsin, mirabile dictu.

I made a brief return foray into Facebook, courtesy of my eldest daughter accidentally signing me back in.

Alas, it remains what it was when I left it--a place for the expression of high dudgeon and moral righteousness. I found out a classmate had passed away unexpectedly, and offered condolences and prayers to others I care about. But then Facebook became Facebook, and I pulled the plug again.

Carried out by the Happiness Research Institute (HRI), the study involved a sample of 1,095 people in Denmark who were divided into two groups, half of whom continued using Facebook while the others stopped.

“We focused on Facebook because it is the social media that most people use across age groups,” Meik Wiking, HRI’s chief executive, said.After a week, those people who had not been on Facebook said they
were more satisfied with their lives, with 88 percent of them describing
themselves as “happy” compared with 81 percent from the second group.Some 84 percent said they appreciated their lives compared with 75 percent in the other group, and only 12 percent described themselves as dissatisfied, compared with 20 percent among those who continued using Facebook.At the end of the experiment, the abstainers reported having a richer
social life and fewer difficulties in concentrating, while the others
reported no such change.“Instead of focusing on what we actually need, we have an unfortunate
tendency to focus on what other people have,” the authors of the study
wrote.In other words, Facebook users are 39 percent more likely to feel less happy than non-users.